He was still wondering when Marci finally got the trunk open. “I normally charge a flat hourly fee plus expenses,” she said, pulling out a stack of slightly creased papers. “But I promised you a discount, so I’m cutting my rate in half and waiving my retainer.” Closing the trunk again to use its hood as a writing surface, Marci crossed several clauses off the top of the contract with an expensive-looking marker she’d pulled from her pocket. Once it was all marked through, she wrote in the new rates by hand before giving the contract to Julius. “Is that okay?”
Julius took the pages with trepidation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an actual physical contract, let alone signed one. The paper felt odd, too, almost tingly. “Is there a spell on this?”
Marci’s eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes, a minor truth spell, just the usual security against falsification. It’s all on the up and up, though, see?” She pointed at the top of the page where the paper had, indeed, been notarized by the State of Nevada Magic Commissioner’s Office. “Nothing nefarious.”
Julius studied the seal for a moment, and then he glanced through the rear window of her car at the backseat, which was packed high with bags and boxes. There’d been boxes in her trunk as well. Clearly, Marci Novalli had left Nevada in a hurry. He wanted to ask why, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to pry, and with the discounted rate she’d written down, he was getting her services for almost nothing.
He felt kind of bad about that, actually, but he needed a mage, she needed work, and a paper contract would keep his name out of any databases that could come back to haunt him. So, before he could second-guess himself into paralysis, Julius took the pen she offered and signed his first name on the dotted line. Only his first name, since the truth spell would have outed his last as a fake. Marci arched an eyebrow, but she didn’t comment as she signed her own name on the line below.
“You won’t be disappointed,” she promised as she snatched the paper up, tucking it into a plastic envelope, which she then slipped into one of the many pockets of her shoulder bag. “Now, what kind of illusion did you need tonight?”
“Well,” Julius said, walking around to the old car’s passenger side. “I need to get into this party.”
Marci’s eyes widened in astonishment, and then, to his surprise, she blushed, her whole face turning bright red. “What kind of party wouldn’t let you in?”
He tilted his head curiously. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly, hurrying around to the driver’s door to unlock the car. “It’s just, you don’t look like the sort of guy who has trouble getting in anywhere, if you get my drift.”
Julius didn’t, but Marci was still blushing for some reason, so he didn’t push the issue. “Not this one,” he said, getting into the car. “It’s some kind of exclusive mage thing, and I’m not a mage.”
“Say no more,” she said, tapping a destination into the flickering console that passed for an autodrive in this relic of a vehicle. “We’ll have you looking magical in no time. What kind of mage do you want to be?”
Julius winced as the car sputtered like an asthmatic old dog, but it made it out of the narrow parking space and down the road without dying, and he eventually relaxed into the threadbare seat. “What are my options?”
Marci’s enormous smile caught him completely off guard, but he had plenty of time to recover as she passionately recited the seemingly endless variety of magical vocations, with commentary, that he could choose from.
Chapter 3
Considering the sorry state of Marci’s car, Julius expected her to drive them somewhere truly scary, like one of those hourly Underground motels where they always found the body in DFZ crime movies. He was pleasantly surprised, then, when her route took them out of the dark undercity altogether, driving north away from the water and the skyways into one of Detroit’s few surviving historic neighborhoods.
By some miraculous happenstance, the old University District had avoided the worst of Algonquin’s initial wave. There was still visible flood damage on the rotting telephone poles, but most of the area’s quaint brick and stone houses with their odd little towers and arches were still intact. Unlike the heavily renovated buildings of the packed Underground they’d just left, though, there were no shops or vending machines or noisy crowds. There didn’t actually seem to be anyone out here at all.
After experiencing the oppressive, cave-like atmosphere of living below another city first hand, Julius though people would be fighting tooth and nail to live out here where there was still sky and fresh air. The moment Marci had driven them out of the shadow of the skyways, however, the crowds had shrunk to a trickle. Even stranger, most of the nice houses here seemed to be abandoned. Some had even been grown over entirely by yards turned wild over years of neglect, which didn’t make any sense at all.
“Why is this place so empty?” he asked, glancing in the side mirror at the cliff-like edge of the two layered city behind them. “We’re only fifteen minutes from downtown, and there’s so much space. Why isn’t it all one giant suburb?”
“Those are all on the south side,” Marci said. “I mean, if you want to see the corp towns, I can totally take you later, but no one builds that stuff up here.”
“Why not?”
She looked at him like he was joking and pointed out his window. When Julius turned to look, though, he didn’t see anything but the same collapsing houses that had prompted him to ask the question in the first place. He was about to ask again when he spotted a glimmer of silver above the rooftops, and he realized he’d been looking too low.
About a hundred feet behind the houses lining the street on his right, a chain link fence topped with razor wire rose high into the evening sky. This far away, it was almost invisible, but now that he was staring straight at it, Julius could feel the faint hum of magic coursing through the air like electricity. “What is that?”
“Reclamation Land,” Marci said. “All the area east from here until the skyways pick up again by the shores of Lake St. Claire is designated for spirits. It’s sort of like a refuge. Spirits live a very long time, which makes them kind of curmudgeonly. A lot of them haven’t adapted well to modern life after the comet woke them up. Some people say that’s the real reason the Lady of the Lakes took Detroit in the first place; she wanted to give her fellow spirits somewhere safe to adjust to their new world. Personally, I think that’s giving Algonquin way too much credit for selflessness, but the Reclamation Land does seem to be a legitimately safe space. Humans aren’t even allowed inside unless they work for the Algonquin Corporation.”
Julius looked at the fence again. He couldn’t see any spirits beyond it—just collapsed houses surrounded by trees and open fields—but after Marci’s story, he could feel their power stronger than ever. The magic here smelled of wild places, of forests and water and mountains. Magic like this did not belong so close to a city, and yet here it was, layered over the rundown homes and overgrown lawns like a blanket of wet snow.
“Anyway,” Marci went on. “That’s the reason this strip of land hasn’t been developed. None of the big companies wanted to build this close to the spirits, and no one else can afford to live here. The lots are spaced so far apart that there aren’t enough people to split the fees for roads, trash, and cops down to an affordable level, and that’s not even counting the wards you’d need.”
“Wards?”
“That fence is to keep people out.” Marci said, nodding at the Reclamation Land border. “The spirits don’t mind it at all. Plus, look at all this open land. Trees and grass and open ground attract supernatural activity everywhere, but this close to Algonquin, the pull is super charged. If you wanted to live in one of those houses, you’d practically need a mage on staff just to keep your property from being overrun.”